A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (24 page)

                 
Back to Tony. The man clearly has no comprehension of guilt. In this way he is ancient. Tony's story is the story of a flipped coin spinning in the air: shame, glory, shame, glory, shame . . . He has a different coin than the other people of his world. This is enough to make him unstoppable.

                 
I want more Tonys.

Here Burr removed a euro coin from his pocket and flicked it in the air. Rather than spin, it knuckled in the air like a Frisbee and fell off the front of the stage into the orchestra pit. He coughed.

           
The more significant aspect of Tony qua spinning coin is not the fact that one side is shame, the other glory. The most significant fact is that the coin is spinning. And he has utter disregard for whichever side will end up on top.

                 
We are always at a crossroads. All ways.

                 
Tony inhabits a liminal space, poised between the poles of shame and glory. There are no other lights for Tony. Just these two. The word
twilight
comes from
dwei
, two, and
light
. . . light. Tony is a twilight dweller. You should all be twilight dwellers.

                 
Any revolutionary is a twilight dweller poised between the government that was and the government that will be.

                 
I'll caution you before we go any further: Liminalism is a dangerous theory. Heard this one: “You're either with us or against us”? Critique Guantanamo, fail to deploy troops to Iraq, run photos of Abu Ghraib, and you're a terrorist. Democracy rests on people both with and against. But make no mistake, the war on terror is a war on the liminal.

                 
Jean-François Lyotard, really the only author you need to read on the postmodern condition—other than Jean Baudrillard [
applause
]—Lyotard posits that postmodernity is a Möbius strip. The metaphor is apt in pointing to the impossibility of ever being outside our hypercapitalist despotic world. The only escape is to embrace the contradiction and conflate inside and outside.

                 
Before Tony exits stage right, he graces us with his terrific “Say good night to the bad guy” monologue. His last line is the one I want to focus on: “Me, I always tell the truth, even when I lie.” No one in the restaurant laughs, which suggests an underlying truth to what should be a punch line. A liminal being, like Tony, inhabits the mood of paradox. The Left must conquer its fear of opposition, its preprogrammed bias in favor of logical exclusion.

                 
What do I mean? Guilt requires exclusion rather than inclusion. I cannot be guilty vis-à-vis someone who is included in “me.” Exclusion is a fallacy. Exclusion was created by that line of humanity who would go on to found country clubs.

                 
But wait, it gets worse. Our very notions of logic require exclusivity. Fundamental to mathematics, science, reason itself, are two notions: the law of noncontradiction and the law of the excluded middle. These laws prohibit us from ever understanding paradox, infinity, the Möbius strip, and Liminalism.

                 
Liminalism is my claim that every person should reject the binary and inhabit the twilit space. We must believe in new gods, even though they don't exist. This is the aforementioned step two. After guilt and innocence have been exchanged for shame and glory, we have to spin that coin. It's not going to be easy.

                 
Why must we fight? Because our digital age is not just wrong, it is exactly wrong. Our entire world is becoming a string of 1s and 0s. There are no fractions, no irrational numbers, in coding. This is a serious problem. Math is going to have to be scrapped. I hear some cheers on that one. Math: start over! It's more serious than just allowing our math to comprehend contradiction. Our math needs to be built from contradiction. This is the hard work that your generation will have to do. Rather than accommodating answers that are both true and false, our math must be rebuilt on the premise that everything is both true and false. Except for the curious fact that the previous statement is both true and false.

                 
Did I lose you in the paradox? No? Your silence just means you are in the
Stimmung
? Good. This is where we really live. One vast threshold, neither in nor out of the room.

                 
I am describing a space. Tonight, here in the theater, the Odeon, are we inside or outside? Some might look up at the stars, see the lights of the news crews around the Olympic center, smell the lean air from a hot day, and tell themselves we are
in
the
outside
. Others might see the enclosure itself as a ring of inclusion. They might think we are all sitting in mutual admiration at our progressive—yet nuanced—liberal view of the modern age and therefore an inside community.

                 
Both are wrong. The Odeon is a Möbius strip.

                 
These problems aren't a remainder that we must ferret out of an otherwise well-functioning system. The remainder is the system.

                 
Rather than wander a thousand plateaus, we should return to the cave. Everything liminal must be inhabited, and every habitation must be liminal. The twentieth century was ruled by the subliminal. This century will be devoted to the liminal. So what is liminal?

                 
The present is an intersection of the past and the future. Sex is an intersection of two people. Riot, protest, conflict, these are all liminal intersections. We must always riot. We must always rebel. Heraclitus reminds us: “From discord comes the only harmony.” This is the playful spirit of liminal action that you must exhibit if you ever wish to break the oppressive dialectic before you. The dancing protestors have it right. “To be in agreement is to disagree.” That's not me; that's Heraclitus.

                 
We must not treat contradiction as a fly in the ointment. It is not the exception; it is the rule.

                 
There is a reason Heraclitus thought the entire world was fire. What is fire? Fire is not a thing. It's a process. Fire is the process of combustion. Fire is the arrow in an equation, it is the
yields
on the way from this to that. Be the arrow. Be fire. Burn everything to the ground.

                 
Otherwise you're just going to be disappointed that you weren't able to go from A to B. You must become that arrow. Activism must be defined by action.

                 
If we take truth in politics to be justice and falsity to be injustice, then we must reformulate our disappointment. Everyone here tonight is, I'm guessing, adamant about the ubiquity of injustice. I'm here to tell you to give it up. There is no justice. Political life is true and false, just and unjust. In order to live a meaningful political life, surrender the hope of justice. The best this hypermodern world offers is bovine innocence. Instead I ask you to revolt. I ask you to turn away from the hegemonic order and claim a glorious alternative. True freedom. Violent freedom. The freedom of twilight . . .

Just as the crowd had finally started to nod, to laugh at the right places, to whoop, Burr caught sight of a young man in black slowly making his way down the center aisle. At first Burr thought the young man was carrying a lighter. The flame flickered on the faces of the crowd. Burr waited for others to raise their own lighters, in some sort of Eric Clapton concert moment, but it didn't happen. He noticed that this was a new twilight. The intersection of the electrical and the analog. Modern man's floodlights and ancient man's torch.

Then it became clear that the flame was too large to be a lighter. This was an actual torch. As the young man reached eye level, still about thirty rows up, he broke into a trot. Burr watched silently as the torch came closer and closer.

The young man was running now, sure that if he didn't move fast, someone was going to tackle him from behind.

The crowd watched expectantly, still not sure that this wasn't a scripted spectacle. There were no whistles. No walkie-talkies. No one at the entrance yelling
Stop!

The young man leapt to the stage and stood, panting, at Burr's side. He was far more nervous than Burr, which made Burr far more nervous in turn.

A liquor bottle, burning slow blue from its cotton wick, passed from the young man to Burr. Flashes from here and there in the crowd. A young woman saw the bottle and yelled
Whoa!

The young man wiped his sweating brow, saying
Go ahead
with a series of quick nods.

Burr leaned far back from the bottle. He leaned in and blew out the wick, which lit back up at once like a trick birthday candle. Now the flame was higher and running faster toward the fuel. The crowd began to recede. A flash of fire, green glass trembling about to explode.

Burr straightened his inquisitive cocked head, looked once more to the crowd, and lobbed the bottle toward the three-storey backdrop of the theater. It flew end over end, whistling and chopping the night air with each turn. Burr prayed it would pass straight through one of the arched windows, any one of the windows.

Glass shattered against the marble wall of the ancient facade. The gasoline spit a fireball toward the crowd. A wave of hot air swept past Burr's face. The crowd gasped. Horrified, Burr looked to one wing of the stage for support and found no one. He looked to the other side and found Baudrillard closing in on the podium like Diomedes, possessed by a will to challenge whatever he would find, be it god or man. He walked with a familiar firm stride. Owen's stride. Long-legged, commanding total attention, with each footfall came purpose. He made his way to the rostrum, blue flames backlighting his wispy white hair.

Silence. The crowd watched the spitting blue fire in total absorption.

Baudrillard pressed the cleft of his chin into the microphone. With an arm around Burr, he addressed the stunned crowd.

—My remarks tonight will be brief:
Go!

The crowd was still in shock. Baudrillard shooed them with both hands:

—
Vite! Vite! Vite!

The young torchbearer, still at Burr and Baudrillard's side, jumped up and down and shouted to the crowd. Baudrillard took him firmly by the triceps:

—That was not your decision to make. Run!

T
he crowd glommed in the walkway of the top row like thick-flowing lava. Every second someone burbled up over the stone wall, popping over the rail and landing on the gravel of the southern slope of the Acropolis, headed for the Parthenon itself. Here the crowd met a cordon of visor-helmeted police, billy clubs in one hand, clear plastic shields in another, and heavily padded men who loaded their blunderbusses with tear gas canisters.

The police began thumping their shields with their black clubs.

Burr was on the side of the sackers. Burr was on the side of the Vandals. He was, for the first time, on the other side of the shield. Each beat of the fifty-police-shield drum brought more terror, more dread.

He had turned his audience into protestors, and now they were in danger of becoming protestors who violently clashed with police, which few of them had signed up for. These were grad students, mainly, who wanted to support a riot in the article-writing third wave, not the armed conflict front line. Half of them looked like they'd come here on dates. They began to withdraw down the slope.

But someone had called in the ringers. Outside the stadium, busloads of shin-guarded, gas-mask-wearing protestors carrying rocks instead of signs jeered at anyone who retreated and vowed that they would overtake the Parthenon, which had been taken over by NBC.

Baudrillard and Burr were watching all of this from the wings of the Odeon. Baudrillard watched the arc of the first shot from the crowd. Though the jagged white chunk of limestone was flying uphill, it had the damned inevitability of a flowerpot dropped from a high-rise window. Baudrillard clenched his teeth. The white rock thumped off a plastic police shield. It was the first answer to the billy-club drumming. The Acropolis was silent. He grabbed Burr's shoulder.

—We need to get you out of here at once.

—We're going to have to hike down. I know the way.

Looking back over his shoulder, Burr saw the police advancing down the hill, driving the crowd back toward the Odeon and away from the media tents, one of which was now smoking.

Baudrillard followed Burr through the main facade. Every available floodlight had been turned on, but they still had to pick their steps carefully down the slope of the Acropolis in the shadows of gnarled olive trees and over thorny clumps of acanthus. Though spines crept up his pant leg with each step, Burr slalomed from clump to clump to avoid sliding down the gravel slope.

They rested against a cypress tree. Baudrillard cleaned his glasses and gestured to the Parthenon. The familiar ecru columns against Athens' clear black sky, the night Parthenon of millions of postcards, was smogged red and orange from tear gas meeting fire. Coughs and screams carried all the way down the rocky outcrop.

—I've seen more than my share of riled-up crowds, and I've heard speeches far more inflammatory than yours that didn't end in this.

Burr was too stunned to speak. He had set fire to the Acropolis. He thought about Owen.

—They're not going to let me on my flight.